Five Books on the Middle Ages
Castles and cathedrals and knights and Vikings, oh my!
Back during the pandemic, I got on something of an escapist kick about the Middle Ages—the period of history stretching roughly from the demise of the western Roman Empire in the late fifth century to the Black Death and the stirrings of the Renaissance in the fourteenth (and by some accounts longer). Most of my attention focused on the Crusades, but it inevitably roamed beyond that episode of human folly.
The Middle Ages have been disparaged as dark ages and romanticized as an era of chivalry in equal measure, especially over the past two centuries. Modern scholars have taken aim at the former portrayal, putting forward the Middle Ages as a mere transition from the complexity of the Roman Empire and a time of flourishing intellectual inquiry. But the Middle Ages were no picnic, and Rome’s collapse was in fact traumatic to those who experienced it firsthand. It later became an impossible-to-follow role model their descendants repeatedly attempted to resurrect in one way or another. These attempts never achieved more than temporary success, however, making it hard to re-establish the stability and dense, far-ranging networks that characterized Rome at its height. Nor does it take anything away from the era to note that its intellectual achievements don’t quite measure up to those made by its predecessors or successors.
As these five books make clear, the Middle Ages were much more interesting than their modern academic defenders seem to assume.
Power and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages: The prolific popular historian Dan Jones provides a comprehensive and irresistibly engaging overview of the Middle Ages that stretches chronologically from the fall of Rome to the Protestant Reformation. Jones lucidly covers both major events like the Arab conquests, the rise and fall of the Carolingian empire, and the sanguinary arrival of the Mongols as well as evolution of monasticism, knighthood, merchant society, and education. Acknowledging all the caveats and complexity stressed by other modern historians, his own conclusions are judicious: while “medieval universities could—and did—serve as clusters for radical thought and reexamination of long-held orthodoxies,” for instance,” they were just as often places where debate was stifled and forcibly shut down, in an attempt to preserve prevailing pieties.” It’s this combination even-handed judgment and lively prose that makes Powers and Thrones well worth reading as an introduction to this fascinating historical period.
Christendom: The Triumph of a Religion, AD 300-1300: It’s impossible to tell the story of the Middle Ages without telling the story of Christianity’s rise and consolidation in Europe, which the historian Peter Heather does quite well in Christendom. In Heather’s telling, Christianity took hold in Europe because of its association with political power: once it became the favored religion of the Roman Empire, elites converted in order to get a leg up for themselves. Later, other polities sought to emulate the political and religious beliefs of their more powerful neighbors—most notably the Carolingian empire and its successor states. Only by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 would what we now recognize as “medieval western Christendom” become firmly established through “more or less directly forced conversion.”
The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England, 410-1066: Historian Marc Morris ably chronicles the twists and turns of power politics in England between the retreat of Rome from Britain in 410 and the Norman conquest in 1066. The sudden withdrawal of imperial power really did plunge Roman Britain into a dark age, with the archaeological record effectively vanishing; as Morris observes, “people must have perished in huge numbers through famine, disease, and violence.” Into this devastated landscape came the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes, all of whom would jockey for power and influence as kingdoms congealed over the centuries and, later, Vikings raided the island. Morris pulls together a compelling historical narrative despite fragmentary evidence, frequently pushing back on nationalistic myths about this period conjured up nearly a millennium later.
Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings: When Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant ominously intoned a tale of Viking raiders driving ships to new land and whispering tales of gore on the band’s hit “Immigrant Song,” he wasn’t too far from the truth according to historian Neil Price’s book. As much as he laments the modern popular image of the Vikings as “a stereotype of maritime aggression,” Price’s own narrative largely corroborates it and makes the case that it’s even bloodier and far more brutal than we imagine. While Price expands our understanding of the Vikings beyond the cliche of the merciless seaborne raider, he does acknowledge that these stereotypes arise from a grim reality. But he also illustrates the vast extent of the Viking influence on the Middle Ages as the first millennium drew to a close, one that saw Vikings and their descendants making themselves felt everywhere from Iceland to Baghdad.
The Greatest Knight: The Remarkable Life of William Marshal, The Power Behind Five English Thrones: Historian Thomas Asbridge brings the politics, armed conflicts, and social mores of the High Middle Ages to life via the biography of William Marshal, the self-proclaimed greatest knight of his day. As an advisor to the ruling Plantagenet dynasty of England and Normandy at its height, Marshal amounts to something of a medieval, aristocratic Forrest Gump—an individual who appears or otherwise finds himself intimately involved in the more noteworthy affairs and episodes of the reigns of kings Henry II, Richard I, and John. As Asbridge makes clear, moreover, Marshal’s life illuminates the customs of medieval chivalry as much as it does the vagaries of the era’s high politics and military tactics.
For a more whimsical look at the Middle Ages—and some thoughts on how we can apply some medieval practices to our own lives today—check out Danièle Cybulskie’s How to Live Like a Monk: Medieval Wisdom for Modern Life and Chivalry and Courtesy: Medieval Manners for a Modern World as well as Olivia M. Swarthout’s quirky Weird Medieval Guys.
If architecture is more your thing, the Great Courses’ set of video lectures on Gothic cathedrals will be up your alley—I found it to be an excellent and informative pandemic-era virtual escape; for a fictional take on cathedral construction in the Middle Ages, there’s thriller writer Ken Follett’s monumental The Pillars of the Earth. It also just so happens that one of my favorite novels, Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, is set in a medieval Italian abbey—as is the entertaining-enough 1986 film adaptation starring Sean Connery as the Sherlockian protagonist William of Baskerville and a young Christian Slater as narrator Adso Melk.
Finally, no list of books and other works on the Middle Ages would be complete without reference to Arthurian legend. Three of my favorites: the OG Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory, the nineteenth century poet Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and of course Monty Python and the Holy Grail—the greatest of all Arthurian tales.